Building a successful social media channel with curated content

Brands are always keen to push out curated content to amplify their brand awareness and stay ahead of the curve, however, it is not uncommon for brands to navigate the wrong route without a proper roadmap put in place.

What Is Curated Content?

Curated content is a collection of different forms of materials, often designed for a particular audience that can be shared across your company’s channels. This can take shape in almost any type and format – infographics, videos, blog posts, presentations are all fair game.

Content curation differs from content creation as it does not involve creating your own content from scratch, but rather, using third party materials on a specific topic from other sources or influencers to share across your channels.

Why Should Brands Curate Content?

Here are five reasons brands need to curate content consistently to get their brand noticed:

1. Increased Organic Traffic

To increase organic traffic effectively, you need to develop a content marketing plan, complete with relevant keywords you want to target. Use this as inspiration to fuel topics and reach out to thought leaders to get their opinions and publish it to your blog.

2. Brand Recognition

Share of voice is an essential element of marketing. By curating content and covering topics that are valuable to your audiences, you can become easily recognizable and even outshine your competitors. Curating content expands the number of pieces you can distribute across your channels. In-house resources can only go so far. Be first in your customer’s minds by sharing fresh ideas and materials on the platforms they use most.

3. Community Building

Behind every piece of content is a community. If you use your content to hit the right notes, topics and news, you’ll be building a loyal community in no time. It is important to note however that community building can expand outside of content curation. In fact, responding to your community in a timely manner, joining group discussions, and addressing reviews on sites are all ways to create a loyal following.

4. Marketing Materials

Curated content has many benefits – it kills a million birds with one stone. While your content can have a tremendous impact on your community building, engagement, and branding, you also have the advantage of growing your marketing materials. This means you’ll have a healthy backlog of supplies you can use to repurpose content on other channels or even equip your sales teams.

5. Influencer Marketing

Content curation opens up many opportunities for you to spark relationships with influencers. Influencer-collaborations are an opportunity to reach new audiences and prolong your message even further.

How Much Curated Content Is Enough?

Curated content can be an easy way to quantify the number of pieces you are able to publish – but you have to be careful not to overdo it.

To decide how much content you should curate, take a look at your current publishing frequency and see how much content you’re publishing overall. If you have space for some curation in your content strategy, you should strive for balance. According to a study published by Convince & Convert, the amount of curated content correlates with the volume of clicks and conversions.

Curator Masters

Companies that publish curated content between 50-75 per cent of the time generate fewer clicks but more conversions. While clicks were 20% lower than Over Curators, their conversion rate was 10 times higher! Turns out a healthy balance is key.

Of course, this rule doesn’t have to hold true for you – you should do some testing to find the sweet spot for your own business.

How to Measure the Results of Your Social Media Content Curation

The beauty of social media marketing is the ability to measure every single one of your initiatives. Metrics that your company should keep a close watch of include Overall Engagement, Engagement per 1,000 followers, Breakdown of Interactions by Types, Volume of Clicks and Follower Growth.

To get more work done in less time, employ a social media marketing platform that will enable you to label posts so you can monitor a campaign’s performance as a whole, rather than hunting down each individual post natively. Once you’ve labelled your “curated content” you can easily segment your analysis to get to the bottom of what’s working.

The Takeaway

Social media marketing is non-stop, which means you need to have tons of content up your sleeve to compete. Creating content in-house only goes so far, and if your content team is small – the struggle can be real. To work efficiently, you need to develop a content curation strategy that will resonate with your audiences.

But before you go on a reposting frenzy, always remember to balance your curated content with original content. Keep a close eye on your engagement rate by analyzing your curated posts and benchmarking them against your own.

Charles Tidswell is the Vice President of JAPAC at Socialbakers and is based in Singapore. For the majority of his professional career, Charles has been involved with early stage start-ups and companies entering the high growth stage across the South East Asia region.

Digital Market Asia is a Singapore based media house that caters to the marketing community in the digital age. The company’s flagship news portal, www.digitalmarket.asia, serves as a comprehensive source of news, views and analyses for all avenues of digital media, marketing and advertising. DMA partners with leading industry events that have a digital and technology focus to them. DMA acts as a lookout for new marketing ideas, emerging tools and technology for marketing and helps companies devise communication strategies for the digital landscape.